"We are planning substantial change to our Self-testing hardware validation programme at UDS-O. Mainly, we are discontinuing the commercial Ubuntu Ready programme and replacing it with a community programme that has the working title “Ubuntu Friendly”," writes Palau.

According to the blueprint, Ubuntu Friendly will be a new community based program, created by Canonical with co-ordination and guidance from the rest of the community and its focus will be self-validation of hardware by all levels of Ubuntu users.

Also noted in the blueprint, there will be a clear process for marking results received through the Community Hardware Testing Infrastructure as Ubuntu Friendly and the initial criteria for hardware receiving the Ubuntu Friendly status will be based on the existing certification criteria; however, there will be opportunities for the community to refine and extend the criteria.

Anyone will be able to review and provide feedback on the results (something like triaging bugs in the Bugsquad). All the test results will be public (except those made it private by the certifiers)

Only a small subset of people (certifiers) will be able issue the Ubuntu Friendly certificate, based on results (in the same way Bug Control is a subset of the Bugsquad that have more permissions to work with Ubuntu bugs).

There will be a way to apply to certifier. Many positive results (and not just one) for a given model and hardware configuration will be needed to mark the system as Ubuntu Friendly.

All the client tools to test Ubuntu, and the tests themselves, will be open source.

Comments

Filling in the blanks...

Between the lines: We're not as commercially successful in the Linux business as we had hoped for, so we're shoving off some of the work on our community.

I give it a few more years and Shuttleworth will get out of the Linux business, which he single handedly has pretty much ruined already.

What is the impact on Canonical's business objectives?

Wednesday May 04 2011 09:45:36 pm

Jef Spaleta

As this is replacing a commercial program, what is the impact here on Canonical's revenue stream and for Canonical's staffing commitment to do equipment testing? Closing down a service offering that cost OEMs money and replacing it with a self-service model doesn't generate revenue and doesn't pay salaries for staffed QA manpower. Is Canonical going to be reducing QA staffing commitments as a result of this change?

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